We're nearly there on an In/Out referendum

Understand this. The European debate in Britain has never really been between supporters and opponents of deeper integration. Most British politicians over the past 40 years would happily have signed up to the idea of a Europe of nations: an association of sovereign democracies bound together by commerce and collaboration. Every prime minister, other than Edward Heath, would have endorsed David Cameron’s call for less regulation and lower costs.

The trouble is that such a deal has never been on offer. Although politicians of all parties occasionally pretend that the EU is about to ‘come our way’, that some recent development – enlargement, or ‘No’ votes, or the euro crisis – will make everything different, the EU carries on agglomerating power. That’s what it was designed to do, just as a shark was designed to swim.

The real row is – and always was – about when to walk away. Eurosceptics believe that the EU is taking on the attributes of statehood, and want Britain to have a different relationship with it, based largely on free trade. Euroenthusiasts, by contrast, seek to convince the nation – or perhaps themselves – that Britain can influence the EU from within. The dispute, in other words, is over whether or not we have a bottom line. Most voters understand that there is a point at which EU membership ceases to be in our national interest; most politicians and diplomats refuse to see it.

The argument over the timing and wording of the referendum needs to be understood in this context. A vote by the British people is the ultimate bottom line: a guarantee that ministers and mandarins won’t, as they so far always have, lose the argument, smile bravely, pretend to have got what they wanted and carry on.

Labour is inching towards a straight In/Out vote, in which it would campaign unequivocally for continued membership. Such a poll would be designed to split the Tories and give Ed Miliband a mandate to do as he will in Brussels.

David Cameron says he doesn’t want an early poll. He wants to renegotiate first, but may have a referendum at the end of the process. He is deliberately vague about the nature of the question. The rest of us should be very clear about what we want.

An In/Out referendum at the end of a renegotiation would, I think, satisfy almost everyone. Eurosceptics would have their guarantee: if the renegotiation failed to secure a free-trade-plus deal for Britain, along the lines of what the EFTA countries enjoy, the electorate would have an opportunity to vote ‘No’, secede and negotiate from the outside, à la Suisse. Such a poll ought also to satisfy supporters of membership: here, after all, is their chance to come back with a deal that they think they could sell to the country.

In reality, though, many Euroenthusiasts hate the idea. The merest possibility of leaving the EU, and ending the sinecures of the consultants and contractors and diplomats and lobbyists and NGOs who rely on it, scares them senseless. Confronted with overwhelming public demand for a plebiscite, they want to fob us off with a fake one: a choice between joining some even deeper union and remaining roughly where we are, perhaps with some token opt-outs.

No one would fall for it. Indeed, rather like Labour’s 75p pension increase, it would simply make matters worse, insulting voters’ intelligence and rubbing their noses in their powerlessness.

So, which will it be? The In/Out vote that, according to the latest poll, 82 per cent of us favour? Or a trick? Many of my regular commenters will be in no doubt: they won’t even have read this far before filling the thread below with furious screeds about Cast-Iron Dave and the LibLabCon and yada yada.

They could be right, of course; but look how far the debate has moved in the past six months. It’s true that few politicians enjoy referendums. Party leaders are naturally reluctant to initiate a process whose outcome they don’t control. But the electoral logic is overwhelming.

Think of it like this: the question is not whether we get an In/Out poll, but which party delivers it. If the Tories refuse to give such a commitment, they will lose the general election, and Ed Miliband will hold such a poll (before going on to bankrupt the country, but that’s another story). If they get this issue right, they will win – and, I hope, open the door to an accommodation with UKIP.

Could a renegotiation succeed? In theory, yes: 62 million Britons could surely negotiate at least as attractive a deal as seven million Swiss or four million Norwegians. Indeed, we ought to get a better settlement than those countries, given the size of our market and our negative trade balance with the EU. It won't happen, though, unless the British government, its Brussels officials and the other member states know that the alternative is withdrawal.

What would constitute a successful deal? One outward sign would be that my job as an MEP disappeared – but that is an indicative rather than a substantive test. The real measure is this. Could Britain independently sign a free-trade deal with a non-EU state – as, for example, EFTA did with Canada in 2008? The PM never misses an opportunity to remind us that the growth in the world economy is taking place outside Europe. He might even have noticed that, last month, the Commonwealth’s GDP overtook the eurozone’s (see here). He surely knows the difference between a free trade area and a customs union. In a speech tomorrow, which has almost certainly been seen in advance by Downing Street, Liam Fox will emphasise the distinction between a common market, based on mutual product recognition, and a single market, based on harmonisation.

Will people be satisfied by a vague promise? Of course not. The strength of the recent letter signed by a majority of Conservative backbench MPs was that it proposed immediate legislation. The date of the eventual referendum might be in, say, 2015 or 2016; but the Bill to hold it needs to be moved in this Parliament.

That we have come as far as we have is due to three things. First, changed global economics: as the EU collapses and the Anglosphere grows, the original rationale for membership has been reversed. Second, reasoned argument: several policymakers have genuinely changed their minds. Third, UKIP: the other parties are keenly aware of their opinion poll surge.

I understand, obviously, why so many UKIP supporters are cynical: Heaven knows they have been lied to often enough. But it is thanks largely to their efforts that the other parties are now talking as they are. Some politicians see the light, others feel the heat; UKIP has been radiating both. Rather than anger, its activists should be feeling pride and pleasure: this is their victory.

We’re not there yet, of course. We need to make sure that the rats don’t get at the precise wording of the question. If you haven’t yet done so, you might consider making a donation to the People’s Pledge. If you can’t afford a donation, how about helping with their constituency-wide referendums in Manchester over the next two weeks? If you can’t do that either, at least make sure all your friends have signed up.